Able and Responsible Artists

Everybody is an artist—either good or bad, responsible or irresponsible. Any life, by working or not working, by working well or poorly changes other lives and so changes the world.

The artistic traditions understood every art primarily  as a skill or craft and ultimately as a service to fellow creatures and to God. An artist's first duty, according to this view, is technical. It is assumed that one will have talents, materials, subjects—perhaps even genius or inspiration or vision. But these are traditionally understood not as personal properties with which one may do as one chooses but as gifts of God or nature that must be honored in use. One does not dare to use these things without the skill to use them well....

To us gifts less than well is to dishonor them and their Giver. There is no material or subject in Creation that, in using, we are excused from using well; there is no work in which we are excused from being able and responsible artists.

—Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" in The Art of the Commonplace